Hillary Clinton: Nelson Mandela “a giant among us”

By Jake Miller

December 6, 2013 / 2:21 PM
/ CBS News

A day after former South African
President Nelson Mandela passed away, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton lauded the late leader and anti-apartheid crusader as a “giant
among us - someone who, by the power of his example, demonstrated
unequivocally how each can choose how we will respond to those
injustices, and grievances, those sorrows and tragedies that afflict all
of human kind.”

Clinton marveled at
Mandela’s capacity for introspection and personal transformation. “I
was always struck by the extraordinary depth of his self-knowledge, of
his awareness about how hard it is to live a life of integrity, of
service,” she said. “But to combine within himself the contradictions he
lived with – a lawyer and a freedom fighter, a prisoner and a leader, a
man of anger and of forgiveness.”

In this file photo, former South African President, Nelson Mandela (R) sits beside then-US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (L) during a meeting in Johannesburg on August 7, 2009.
DENIS FARRELL/AFP/Getty Images
“I only hope that as we
both mourn and celebrate the passing of this universally recognized and
beloved figure that we remember that he became that as a result of an
enormous amount of hard work on himself,” she said.

Clinton accompanied her
husband, then-President Bill Clinton, to Mandela’s inauguration in 1994
as he took office after the end of apartheid, becoming South Africa’s
first black president. On Friday,
she recalled the magnanimity Mandela displayed on that day by thanking
even those who played a part in his decades-long imprisonment.

“And as he looked out at
the large crowd gathered, filled with dignitaries everywhere, including
people who had been part of the struggle itself against apartheid and
who had supported that struggle,” she recalled, ”he made the point of
thanking his jailers and pointing out that, of all the distinguished
VIPs who were there, he was most grateful that these men, with whom he
had exchanged words of recognition, of acknowledgement of the other's
humanity over the course of that long imprisonment, could be there as
well.”

Clinton’s remarks on
Mandela came as she accepted an award from the Lantos Foundation for
Human Rights and Justice, an organization started by late congressman
and holocaust survivor Tom Lantos.

In her speech, she dwelt
on the similarities between Lantos and Mandela, describing both as “men
who had seen the worst of what humanity had to offer.”

“They had every reason to come out – if not
embittered, cynical – believing that, for the rest of their lives, the
only thing that would matter would be acquiring power,” she said. “What
always struck me about Nelson Mandela and Tom Lantos was the joy, the
curiosity, the enthusiasm for life that they brought with them out of
the depths of such suffering.”